PubWan activity consists of productive and consumptive activities. Since pubwan must be an all-volunteer effort, pubwan productive activities involve volunteering. A PubwanParticipant can volunteer time, labor, things, or information. Voluntary contributions of money would necessitate bookkeeping and other forms of bureaucracy. If there are benefactors with givable money, it is suggested that they instead volunteer instead things that cost money. Right now, (not FreeAsInBeer) things most needed by the movement include bandwidth, ad-free webspace, CGI access, and SQL access. Since plans include implementing pubwan as a public distributed database, it is assumed that the pubwan movement's material needs will generally be public knowledge in the future.
Consumptive pubwan activity can best be described as querying the pubwan database(s) for decision support purposes. The primary purpose of pubwan is to provide a free (as in beer) decision support facility for individual use. Since the movement has tentatively adopted the CypherpunksAntiLicense, there are no restrictions on use, so there is of course nothing preventing or discouraging institutional (group entity) use of pubwan resources. This should not be a problem, as long as pubwan principles are maintained. (see PubwanIs)